Pythonizing vim

The link is a screencast of a code-completion/calltips plugin for vim created by Roman Roelofsen. Every time I try an IDE or another text editor, I always come back to vim for its simplicity, usability, and power. Sure, code-completion and calltips are nice features, but not something that would make me abandon vim. Now, I won't have to choose. The calltips appear to pull from dir() and __doc__ on whatever object your cursor is over. It looks like it intelligently discovers the type of the object and displays its attributes and methods. While I typically code with vim and an IPython shell up simultaneously, this will almost definitely reduce the amount of time I spend switching between the two.

Roman said on the Python mailing list that he should be announcing a beta soon. This is a very impressive piece of work so far. I look forward to the release.

4 Comments

TweeZz
2005-11-10 23:33:45

geek talk #1
What is wrong with IDE's? Are you really that much faser with vim? I use to have a friend telling me the same things as you are telling me... I didn't believe it then, I don't believe it now, I'll never believe it. Hail to IDE's!

sava.chankov
2005-11-11 02:48:47

mind numbing IDEs
While code-completion might look nifty when using libraries written by other people, implications on developer's mind are quite ugly - it imposes bottum-up style. Charles Petzold had elaborated upon this very well http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

jmjones
2005-11-11 05:39:16

geek talk #1
I honestly believe that I am faster with vim than I would be otherwise with an IDE. I could be mistaken, and it could all be just a psychological trick I'm playing on myself, but, yes, I believe it to be so. I don't have to reach for the mouse, um....ever, not even to highlight something to copy and paste. I don't have to move my fingers from the home keys, not even to move around. I don't have to fight intellisense when it's trying to fill in something that's not what I want. I can do some wicked macro-like things in nearly no time flat. Case in point, whenever I type "dff" in insert mode, I get a blank function definition and the cursor in position to type in the function name. And "dmm" for a method" and "dcl" for a class. I'm sure you can probably do such silly things with most decent text editors and I suspect the same to be true of IDEs. Anyway, I believe that I am more productive with vim with any IDE that I've tried. You may write this off as bogus bunk, and that's fine. The point of this blog wasn't so much to discount IDEs as it was to point outu Roman's excellent code-completion/calltips plugin for vim. I believe that providing such features from within vim will make me more productive. And if I had access to all of the vim goodness that I'm used to from within Eclipse or VisualStudio, I might even use them.

jmjones
2005-11-11 05:42:33

mind numbing IDEs
I didn't read the whole thing yet as it's quite lengthy. But from the little that I read (most of the IntelliSense section), he seemed to be saying that MS VS freaking out when you don't have either the righth imports or any imports imposed bottup-up style because the alternative is just too painful. But if there were an editor that handled auto-completion reasonably and just did nothing when it didn't have a match, rather than trying so hard to match something, you could very easily stub out incomplete or missing libraries and just go on (and be able to smoothly do top-down coding).

Sign up today to receive special discounts, product alerts, and news from O'Reilly.